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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26432284">The Hardest Truth</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/anignoranthistorian/pseuds/anignoranthistorian'>anignoranthistorian</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Anne with an E (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Historical realness, marriage bar, the reality of the turn of the century, there is no justice here</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 04:01:18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>614</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26432284</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/anignoranthistorian/pseuds/anignoranthistorian</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>As their educations progress, Gilbert and Anne Blythe become further immersed in the inequities of their time. In their third year at the University of Toronto, the Canadian government institutes a marriage bar, legally prohibiting married women from working in the professions.<br/>Does Anne look to Gilbert and see him as the reason she can not do as she pleases? Perhaps, for a bit. Does he look to himself and understand his good fortune to be born a man? She doesn't know.<br/>They plan to find a place that will have them both. They'll tell fibs if they must. They're decided on this.<br/>But strangers have a long memory for the unusual and that is something that can't be outrun. To try is to come to the hardest question, the hardest truth.<br/>Do they regret?</p><p>PART FOUR OF HALF-AGONY, HALF-HOPE</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Gilbert Blythe/Anne Shirley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Hardest Truth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The students and faculty of the University of Toronto unanimously agreed: the Blythes were an odd pair. Gilbert Blythe had arrived from one of the Maritimes in the autumn of 1899 without a lick of Greek, a plethora of hands-on medical experience, and what could only be described at the time as a “non-wedding ring” on his left hand. Come January of 1900, he arrives back to the city, red mud still on his boots, and a girl with hair like a copper penny at his elbow. The ring was very much still in place. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>From church pews, ladies watched the young newlyweds, waiting for the first sign of an impending new arrival. It never came. Theories as to the reason behind the Blyhtes’ sudden nuptials were thus revised. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It was yet another conundrum to be worked out when they saw the new Mrs. Blythe standing around in University corridors, waiting for the doors of a lecture hall to open. They hardly ran in the same circles, but if the English lecturers and science professors were to have compared notes, they’d see that each Blythe had a propensity for taking a seat in the front row and a deep love of answering questions correctly. Their instructors couldn’t help but look to the two studious teenagers and wonder: hadn’t someone, somewhere told them that they would be quite well served to </span>
  <em>
    <span>wait</span>
  </em>
  <span>?</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Perhaps this was explained away by the news that hung in the air-- rarely actively spread but somehow commonly known: the Blythes were both orphaned. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” thought Thomas France, a Freshman History student who had never met the couple. “Aloneness can push people into the arms of the absurd.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Stranger still, there were times when the Blythes spoke in confusing terms, as though lost in the memory of some other year. For example: “Oh, my friend Anne loves Tennyson,” or “Gilbert Blythe to this day thinks he can best me in academics, but luckily I have a wonderful memory and I am not quick to forget that in November of 1896 he was unable to spell ‘engagement.’’’ </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It would soon become clear that the Blythes existed in multitudes: they were at once rivals, companions, confidants, and partners.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I wonder,” said Nora Livingston, a second year Botany student, after it was revealed in a casual conversation that the couple had other family members. “If Anne and Gilbert Blythe’s families even </span>
  <em>
    <span>know </span>
  </em>
  <span>they’re married. I mean, would </span>
  <em>
    <span>your</span>
  </em>
  <span> parents let you marry the boy from next door? When you were only fifteen or something like it?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>In summary, it was very difficult for Toronto to see why One would commit Oneself when One didn’t have to. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>But the life of an undergraduate is fast-moving and outpaces most suggestions and very many suspicions. Graduates disperse like a vast diaspora--these were the years before the Great War-- onwards and upwards, through the streets of Canada’s cities, green in their newness, on trains going south, one foot now planted in American mud, and on ships bound for the Old World, a sort of civilization which only had eleven more years to live. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And so, you see, the grapevine grows. And it grows. And it does not tumble, and it does not forget the rumors or the stories or the crude understandings of the provincial Blythes and their inconceivable recklessness, of their inability to do things </span>
  <em>
    <span>as they should be done</span>
  </em>
  <span>, and of the incomprehensible, undulating timeline of their lives and of their memories. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And that University diaspora-- that great grapevine-- does not fail to remember that in January of 1900 Gilbert and Anne Blythe arrived in Canada’s new metropole married and moronic as the day is long. </span>
</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hi, everyone. I know it's been a while. This has just been kind of sitting around on my computer, waiting to be made longer... but it looks like this is all that's coming right now :/ I wasn't feeling very inspired and was beginning to wonder if my imagination had done all it could do within this fandom. I began writing an original piece of historical fiction, then I started a new job, and now I'm getting ready to move halfway across the country to Chicago to begin graduate school.<br/>I'm super unsure what my life and my schedule and my free time to write is going to look like when I'm in school. I don't know if this is going to update, or if I'll focus my energy on my original fiction, but I will try to post SOMETHING on AO3 every now and again!<br/>I hope you're all doing well! My cat Edith says hi!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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